Music Features

The band Songhoy Blues from Bamako, Mali.

Musicians From Mali Offer Advice On Getting Through Hard Times

8:23am November 12, 2020

by Anastasia Tsioulcas

Facing a pandemic lockdown, huge political upheavals and ongoing uncertainty about the future, musicians including Oumou Sangare and Songhoy Blues offer lessons in creativity and optimism.

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Sade performs live at New Jersey's PNC Bank Arts Center in 2001. The artist released her fifth album, Lovers Rock, in November 2000.

Music & Culture

Sade Saves

5:14pm November 11, 2020

by Danyel Smith

Rest assured, says writer Danyel Smith: There's always a Sade song for how you feel. Whether you live as a "King of Sorrow" or a "Soldier of Love" is up to you.

Billy Joe Shaver, photographed onstage during Willie Nelson's 4th of July Concert at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on July 4, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas.

Music & Culture

The Ballad Of Billy Joe Shaver And Jerry Jeff Walker, Country Outlaws

6:00am November 08, 2020

by Charles Aaron

The deaths of Walker and Shaver this month prompted critic Charles Aaron to consider the impact of their work on the wider sound of American music.

Music & Culture

Namir Blade's Beautiful, Dystopic, Extraterrestrial Rap

1:22pm November 06, 2020

by Jewly Hight

Blade, based in Nashville, has parlayed a youth of solitude into an artistic practice based inspired by video game soundtracks and visions of a dark, silver-lined future.

Nashville's music industry has never given homegrown hip-hop the support it deserves, so the city's artists and entrepreneurs are creating their own institutions.

Hip-Hop In Nashville Is Making Its Own Way

1:39pm November 05, 2020

by Jewly Hight

Rap from Nashville isn't new, nor is the city's tendency to overlook the creators and entrepreneurs behind that music – despite country artists borrowing liberally from the genre over the past decade.

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A.B. Eastwood's Ever-Expanding Beat

1:17pm November 05, 2020

by Jewly Hight

The autodidact producer spent time learning in Florida, before returning to Nashville with a vision for elevating the entire city.

Music & Culture

Daisha McBride, The Rap Girl, Can Do Anything

12:19pm November 05, 2020

by Jewly Hight

McBride has channeled her performing abilities, affably clever personality and college-level industry studies into her own version of artistic and professional equilibrium in Music City.

The BlackSon, center, photographed with several members of the BlackCity, Funky Tenn collective.

The BlackSon And BlackCity Are Generating 'Free Power'

12:19pm November 05, 2020

by Jewly Hight

After his older brother helped The BlackSon get his artistic career underway, the pair now find themselves living in a new "city."

The Songwriting Success Of Singing Rapper Tim Gent And Rapping Singer Bryant Taylorr

12:18pm November 05, 2020

by Jewly Hight

The pair have found and are maintaining a place for themselves in the professional songwriting world of Nashville.

In the early 2000s, DJ Drama's mixtapes launched artists' careers and defined a new sound. But when mixtapes became a scapegoat for the music industry's collapse, Drama took the fall.

Music & Culture

The Raid That Changed Rap

6:34pm October 29, 2020

When federal agents raided DJ Drama's studio in 2007 over his Gangsta Grillz empire, he became a martyr for mixtape culture. In many ways, it never recovered.